That’s the Forester. When it rolled into the driveway, I thought, well, it looks it will be dry inside when it rains. There wasn’t much else to say about it.

Now, after nearly a week with the Forester, I’m beginning to understand the, um, value of oatmeal. The Forester is just that sort of car. Overall, it grows on you, but there are some glaring nits (Ed. note: if they were glaring, they’d be more than nits.)

The Forester is Subaru’s smallish crossover SUV that competes with the Honda CR-V, Mazda CX-5 and Nissan Rogue. It is a pretty square little wagon that is meant to haul five people – that back seat could get kind of crowded – and a fair amount of luggage. It’s a fairly humdrum design and no one is going to mistake it for an Aston Martin shooting brake.

But here is the thing about the Forester and its brethren: it has a well-proven all-wheel-drive (AWD) system that, over the past few decades, has propelled this car into an enviable marketing slot. This is the National Car of New England. Having just returned from a couple of weeks back there, I can attest to the fact that Subarus – Foresters, Imprezas, Legacys, Outbacks, Crosstreks — are all over the place. More to the point, you see them slogging smartly through blizzards and ice storms with the kind of sure-footedness that makes the deer stand by the side of the road and gawk with amazement.

All well and good, but…. You do pay a price for this. Foresters used to be down in the low $20,000s and you can still buy a stripper, starting at $22,195. But the car we had, a 2014 Forester 2.5i Touring, had a sticker price of $33,220. Admittedly, the CR-V and its mates are up there, too, but at $33,000-plus, we’re getting into the territory that makes this more than just a basic cheap hauler. (In my pitch for recycling, I would also point you toward lightly used crossover SUVs from Lexus or the Germans, cars that retailed for upward of $45,000 new and, a few years under their timing belts, are down in the low 30s.)

The Forester, however, is what’s on today’s plate. I liked the car’s overall handling – no snow storms on our test route – and it’s fairly quiet at highway speeds. It’s powered by a 2.5-liter four-cylinder 170-horsepower engine – so far, so good – and it brings what’s left of that power to the road with a continuously variable transmission. A curse on your CVT. It. Is. Sluggish. No other way to put it.

Inside, when you look around, you’d think that Subaru might have done the interior with a bit more imagination and finesse. The Touring version has a standard navigation system and, in a separate window, the image produced by a rear view camera. The window itself is small and it’s buried deep in the middle of the dashboard. Why not put it in the larger (6.1-inch) navigation window? The stereo switches are too small and the overall feeling is one of an interior that had been cobbled up by a Subaru design team years ago, then put on the shelf and forgotten until someone said, hey, we need a new inside for the 2014 Forester wagon.

Pay your $33,000-plus for this car, however, and you will get some amenities. The “Option Package 30,” for example (ringing in at $2,400) has such useful gizmos as lane departure warning, pre-collision braking system and adaptive cruise control. The last one means you can set it and it keeps you from running into the car ahead of you. But I couldn’t get the cruise control to work properly – it would only increase speed in five-miles-an-hour increments, rather than one-mile-an-hour.

In the wayback, Subaru has installed a thoughtful pair of buttons, one on each bulkhead, that release the second-row seatbacks and send them flying forward. Can’t tell you how much that helps. Remember the old SUV mantra of opening the rear doors and fiddling with the seatback locks? Subaru has put that chore to bed.

Why buy this car, then? There is no specific reason because, aside from the AWD and the seatback gadgets, nothing really stands out. It’s more the whole of the car that does it. It feels sure-footed and I know from the experience of driving my niece’s 2010 Legacy sedan that these things really do plow through the bad weather.

They’ve got the mechanicals pretty much sorted. It just would be nice if someone at Subaru would start putting as much effort into the inside as they do the rest of the car.